Police killed more people in Wisconsin than in past years | Analysis

With months left to go in 2017, the number of people fatally shot by police in Wisconsin has surpassed the total for each of the past two years.
Noell Dickmann/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin.

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Numerous law enforcement vehicles and SWAT teams respond to shooter in March 2017 at an apartment complex on the corner of Aspen Street and Ross Avenue in Weston. A police detective and three others were killed in a series of shootings.(Photo: T'xer Zhon Kha/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin)Buy Photo

Note: This story was updated after originally published to include the most recent shooting deaths.

Police in Wisconsin killed more people in 2017 than in each of the past two years and more than twice as many as in 2015, an analysis shows.

A fatal shooting in the town of Peshtigo on Dec. 7 was the 24th in the state this year and the 52nd since January 2015, according to figures compiled by The Washington Post, the Wisconsin Professional Police Association and USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin.

USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin verified each fatal shooting, pulling from news and investigative reports and interviewing authorities to learn more about the trend.

Last year, police shot and killed 17 people in the state. In 2015, the number was 11.

"It's certainly troubling," said Jonathan Safran, a Milwaukee personal injury and civil rights attorney who has taken on some of the state's highest-profile police shooting cases.

For Michael Bell, who lost his son in a police shooting, it's imperative that Wisconsin dig into these cases and look for ways to prevent such deaths in the future. For Eau Claire Police Chief Jerry Staniszewski, whose department has been involved in three fatal shootings this year, the numbers illustrate the complicated nature of policing when it seems easier to get a gun than to address mental health issues.

Shootings dot the state

Communities across Wisconsin, from the far northeastern city of Pembine to near Mount Hope in the opposite corner, have experienced fatal shootings in the last 2½ years.

Most had a single death at the hands of police. But four cities — Eau Claire, Madison, Milwaukee and Wauwatosa — have had more than one since the beginning of 2015. The greater Wausau area, including Lincoln and Langlade counties to the north, experienced six fatal police shootings in less than two years.

"It's not just urban agencies or rural agencies," said Jim Palmer, executive director of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association, an advocacy group. "It's a pretty broad mix, so I think for law enforcement officers on the street, I think it reinforces to them how important it is to be prepared and to be careful approaching the variety of situations that they have to confront on a daily basis."

In most cases, officers shot someone who was armed — usually with a gun, according to investigative accounts of the shootings. Palmer said police are increasingly facing people willing to confront officers with a weapon.

Circumstances of shootings vary

There is no one reason or narrative in these shootings — a reality that confronted the Eau Claire police chief three times since the beginning of the year.

"To try to look at these three scenarios and come up with a single cause, it's as complicated as human nature itself," Staniszewski said.

One clear issue, he said, is a need for more mental health services and resources for crisis prevention. The Eau Claire community has focused on that problem in the aftermath of the shootings; a local mental health coalition recently received a $1 million grant to help youths learn to cope.

Officers deal more often with people who are in crisis and those attempting suicide by cop, Staniszewski said.

After an Eau Claire officer killed 49-year-old Matthew Zank in January, authorities found a suicide note in his pocket saying he wanted to die and apologizing to the police, Staniszewski said.

Easy access to firearms — and their acceptance — compound the problem.

"The challenge is that because people have less conflict resolution strategies, they turn right to weapons," the chief said. "When people don’t have a mechanism to deal with their problems, those guns are easily accessible and ... it puts people in danger."

The national conversation about police shootings and officer-involved violence has also forced people to look locally and ask questions, he said. It's prompted regular conversations between Eau Claire police and minority groups, which Staniszewski sees as a good thing.

Sheboygan Police Chief Christopher Domagalski, president of the Wisconsin Chiefs of Police Association, said his department has experienced a 30 percent increase in emergency mental health detentions from 2016 to 2017.

From January through June 2016, police put 82 people in emergency detention. The number jumped to 118 people during the first six months of 2017.

"We probably go to 10 calls a day," Domagalski said, "just ... to check on somebody, to determine if they're a threat to themselves or to somebody else."

Room for improvement

The increase in fatal shootings didn't come as a surprise to Michael Bell, whose son, Michael E. Bell, was shot and killed by a Kenosha police officer in 2004.

After an internal investigation, the officers involved were quickly cleared in his death.

Bell wants his son's case reopened — he believes it involved a cover-up — and he wants larger system reforms.

"What happens now is that when a police officer shoots somebody, the first thing that they do is they try to discredit the person that was being shot so that they can win public opinion ... instead of actually fixing the actual cause,” he said.

The model Bell's advocating involves reviews of incidents by an external agency and recommendations to improve the system, collection of data to measure whether reforms are working, and dissemination of lessons learned.

Safran, the civil rights attorney, is unsure why police shooting deaths are increasing but offered a few additional possibilities.

Although it seems there's more emphasis on training to de-escalate situations and on crisis intervention, he said those tactics only recently received extra attention.

"So over the years, we've seen more continuation of training that if an officer, for almost any reason, believes that he or she is in fear of great bodily harm or death to herself or someone else, that certainly the law allows them, technically, to potentially use deadly force," he said. "But they seem to be much more willing to utilize that as opposed to attempting to de-escalate the situation."

Police have a difficult job, he said, and society has become increasingly violent; criminals are more apt to be armed and have higher-powered weapons than in the past. And while he said there are times when shooting might be the only alternative, he questioned whether that was the case in many shootings across Wisconsin.

He also sees indications that mental illness and substance abuse are playing a role in shootings.

The wider context

Some in the criminal justice field say the number of fatal shootings only tells part of the story.

Including times when police shot someone who didn't die, the overall numbers of officer-involved shootings are steady from year to year, Palmer said.

"Any police shooting, it's a lethal use of force," he said. "So any lethal use of force can result in a fatality, and so I think that's why looking at both fatal and nonfatal numbers provides a more accurate picture than just the number of fatal police shootings."

As of mid-September 2015 and 2016, there had been a total of 24 fatal and nonfatal shootings in the state, Palmer said. At that point this year, there had been 23, he said.

In that case, the central question is why more people hit by police gunfire are dying, said David A. Klinger, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who worked as a patrol officer for the Los Angeles Police Department.

The possible reasons for the increase in deaths in Wisconsin are many, and they don't necessarily have to do with the interactions that lead police to shoot, he said.

To really get a handle on police use of deadly force, he recommended focusing on officers' decisions to shoot — regardless of the outcome. That's complicated, however, by a lack of reliable figures nationwide on how many times police use deadly force, even if it doesn't result in death.